For those of you planning to watch some TV this evening, the New York Times provides a good review for Human Behavior, showing tonight at 9pm on the Sundance channel and Court TV:

People wonder how ordinary American soldiers, men and women, could have
mistreated prisoners so barbarically at Abu Ghraib. "The Human Behavior
Experiments," a documentary on both Court TV and the Sundance Channel
tonight, suggests that actually it's surprising such things don't
happen more often. . .

"Human Behavior," written and produced by Alex Gibney, who also
made "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," fills in some of the
psychological blanks by illustrating how, in certain circumstances,
people readily obey even far-fetched instructions. Most of all, the
film shows how easily people lose perspective and basic decency when in
the grip of a credible authority figure or even just a difficult group
dynamic.

Old film taken from interviews with Dr. Milgram, who
died in 1984, reveal a mild, slightly pedantic man with big glasses and
a chin beard, who explains that the Holocaust made him want to
understand better how it was possible for ordinary people to act
"callously and inhumanely." He set out to study authority and explore,
as he put it, "under what conditions could a person obey, when
commanded, actions that went against conscience."

He devised a
study in which subjects delivered what they thought were painful
electric jolts to a fellow participant, merely because they were
encouraged to do so by the scientist in charge who assured them it was
necessary for a learning experiment. The film shows one middle-aged man
balking after hearing what he thinks is the subject howling in pain (in
reality it is a recording), but many more — about 60 percent — keep
increasing the pain levels under calm but firm instruction from the
experimenter, "Continue, please."

Dr. Zimbardo's prison study
was even more shocking, if only because the students assigned to play
guards were not instructed to be abusive, and instead conformed to
their own notions of how to keep order in a prison: "Lord of the Flies"
in sideburns and aviator sunglasses. The prisoners were blindfolded,
stripped, assigned numbers and forced to wear skimpy hospital gowns and
ankle chains. The guards were given handcuffs, whistles and billy
clubs. The scientists received a shocking display of how, as one of
them put it, "human nature transformed in a very rapid way in the face
of a very powerful situation."

The abuse kept escalating
until, on the fourth day, it turned into sexual humiliation. Prisoners
began breaking down. Dr. Zimbardo and his team were so engrossed by the
experiment that they too lost sight of reality. In the film Dr.
Zimbardo recalls that it was not until his girlfriend visited the mock
prison and threatened to break up with him that he snapped out of it
and ended the study early.

The Stanford students knew they were
taking part in a psychology experiment. Soldiers assigned to guard
prisoners at Abu Ghraib were told that the survival of comrades on the
front lines depended on whether they could break the prisoners. Dr.
Zimbardo, who in 2004 served as an expert witness in the court martial
of Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II, who was convicted of assault, indecent
acts and dereliction of duty at Abu Ghraib, said he was "an ordinary
good guy who gets into this place and is totally corrupted."

The documentary uses several cases, from the 1964 murder of Kitty
Genovese, when 38 neighbors in Queens heard or saw parts of the fatal
attack and did nothing, to a 2005 hazing ritual that killed Matthew
Carrington, a 21-year-old student at California State University,
Chico, to make a point about herd mentality: that people who might give
help when by themselves will, among others, hold back and follow the
cues of a majority. The person who goes against the group or defies
authority is a rarity.

"It is the majority who conform, who comply, who obey authority," Dr. Zimbardo says. "And that's what nobody wants to hear."

That rule is certainly something most people prefer to forget. "Human Behavior" is a riveting, if unsettling, reminder.